I'd like to invade her Gaza Strip
A little over four years ago in this space, I wrote this about sending a care package to my brother-in-law Kevin who was in fighting in Iraq:
Since he once told me that his favorite magazine is Maxim -- and that it has replaced Playboy as the magazine the guys fight over most -- I had planned to go down to the 14th floor and pick up a few copies for him. Then Becky sent us the regulations: "Any matter containing religious materials contrary to Islamic faith or depicting nude or seminude persons, pornographic or sexual items, or non-authorized political materials is prohibited." I was pretty sure Maxim fails several of those tests, so we sent Blender and some other publications Kevin probably has no interest in (along with wet wipes and candy wrapped in the same cheery yellow as cluster bomblets, just to mix things up a bit.)What a chump I am. On Saturday, the New York Times ran this photo of Kevin's brigade. You can't quite see it here, but the guy on the right is clearly reading a copy of...Hustler!
Imagine -- I watched M*A*S*H my whole childhood, and never learned that Army rules are meant to be broken.
So anyway, Kevin is in Iraq again. Apparently there's still a teeny bit of policing up to do. This time I was just gonna go ahead and send the Playboys. Surely the Army would have more important things to worry about now. But it turns out Kevin's unit is actually embedded with Iraqi Army forces, so that seemed a little too risky. I figured the new issue of Maxim, however, would probably be safe.
And then I saw that the new issue of Maxim features a photo spread of women of the Israeli Defense Forces. Sending it could, um, start a war.
At least Stuff managed to get a July issue out. Iraqis don't have any problem with Brazil, do they?
By the way, the geopolitically inapt but irresistible title of this post is blatantly lifted from one of the entries in Gawker's rewrite the Post headline challenge. (My efforts are here).
Update. Related pics [Via Fleshbot].